Vox.com is now unofficially Hamas’ foremost apologist among juiceboxers in the West.
I’m not making that up. Check out today’s offering.
Do we even need to read the rest?
The “militants” are Hamas terrorists who are hiding weapons in schools, near children and families, to provide the Israelis with a terrible choice: Bomb the schools to get the rockets and maybe kill children, or leave the rockets alone knowing that they will eventually rain down on Israel’s cities and kill Israeli children.
Hamas forces Israel into that choice for the propaganda value gained with every civilian death. Or, to destabilize Israel’s government if it chooses not to strike those targets.
Hamas is still designated a terrorist group, even by the Obama-Kerry State Department. Vox is thus knowingly setting itself up as an apologist for terrorists.
Hiding weapons of war in schools is a war crime, straight up. Targeting civilians intentionally, as Hamas does, is also a war crime. Thus, Hamas quite deliberately commits war crimes, and quite deliberately poses impossible choices for the democratically-elected Israeli government, for strategic and propaganda reasons.
Here’s how Vox’s Max Fischer treats that.
Both Hamas’s use of civilian Palestinian buildings and Israel’s strikes against those buildings are highly controversial, and rightly so. It would be understating things pretty dramatically to say that this an aspect of the Israel-Hamas conflict where both sides are behaving badly. But that does not make them equivalent.
“…both sides are behaving badly.” Moral equivalency between the terrorists who are choosing to put their own people in peril, and the democratically elected government that is acting to protect its own people.
Only the people responsible can know for sure why Palestinian militants would use civilian buildings, but any real possibility is bad. Maybe militant groups use civilian buildings like this UN school simply because they don’t mind the danger this creates for the Palestinians they claim to protect. Maybe it’s because they are hoping that the rockets will be safer in a UN school because Israel won’t want to bomb it, which means using Palestinians kids and teachers as human shields. An argument you hear from Hamas’s harshest critics is that they are hoping Israel will target the schools, thus rallying people to their side.
Hamas’ “harshest critics” have it right.
None of these speaks well of militant groups or the effects of their rocket campaigns on Palestinian civilians. It is not a great secret that “resistance” campaigns by groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad bring far greater harm to Palestinian civilians than they do anything resembling liberation, but this incident is a small glimpse of how, and of the effects of militant groups firing hundreds of rockets into Israel from densely populated neighborhoods in Gaza.
Hey, he got something right. Have a cookie.
Here’s the thing, though: while incidents like this force Israel to decide between bombing civilian structures or allowing Hamas to use those structures as rocket storage depots, it does not actually force Israel to choose to bomb civilian buildings. It is entirely within Israel’s power to not bomb civilian buildings.
Did a 10-year-old write that? Certainly someone with no moral foundation at all, no understanding of the laws of war, and no understanding at all of military strategy or the purpose of propaganda, wrote it.
In all seriousness, it’s C level work for a decent middle school. Or it’s expert trolling, getting people to click just to gawk at the stupidity. Hey, Slate makes a decent living off that tactic.
If this is “explanatory journalism,” then the genre needs to die, and quickly.
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